Place Names: manuel arturo abreu and Christopher Paul Jordan

March 18 - May 20

Place Names: manuel arturo abreu and Christopher Paul Jordan

Place Names is an exhibition by regional artists manuel arturo abreu (Portland, OR) and Christopher Paul Jordan (Tacoma, WA). Through painting, sculpture, built environments and explorations of language, Place Names explores the abstracted visual and emotional queues that influence how a sense a “place” is communicated. The artists each construct visual narratives from notions of the geographical and cultural locales that have been generative to their thinking as artists and poets. The works in Place Names appropriate objects such as stray window frames, graffiti-laden panels, and well worn maps as signifiers of the cultural, economic and racial influences within inherited identity.

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is an artist and writer from the Bronx. They received their BA in Linguistics from Reed College in 2014, and currently live and work in a garage in southeast Portland. Recent group exhibitions with Rhizome and the New Museum (online), the Cooley Gallery (Portland), Chicken Coop Contemporary (Portland), Veronica project space (Seattle), and AA|LA Gallery (Los Angeles). Recent publications in Art in America, Rhizome, CURA, SFMoMA Open Space, AQNB, et al. abreu is the author of List of Consonants (Bottlecap Press, 2015) and transtrender (Quimérica Books, 2016), and their debut collection of critical writing is forthcoming 2018.

Christopher Paul Jordan integrates virtual and physical public space to form infrastructures for dialogue and self-determination among dislocated people. Jordan’s paintings and sculptures are artifacts from his work in community and time-capsules for expanded inquiry. Jordan is recipient of the 2017 Neddy Artists Award for painting, the Jon Imber Painting Fellowship, the GTCF Foundation of Art Award, the James W Ray Venture Project Award, and the most recent summer commission for Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.